Daily Archives: 2020-05-06

Article note: I'm still dealing with WordPress largely because I wanted to keep comments and most other systems are too shit for that.
Holy shit does this situation make me wish for the now-dead dream of the actually-distributed Web, with something like the Microformats XFN stuff so everyone can converse from their own system and still tie it together, instead of even the technical folk saying "Just give it to the big ~~land~~ platform owners."

Article note: I was working with University students in CS/EE/CpE programs and had some of the same story.
Also Students with day jobs in essential industries. Students with kids of their own. Students out in the hills with unreliable internet access or power. Students in different time zones. Students with computers sent off for repair. Students working primarily off tablets. Etc.
For the courses I was working on, we tried our best to have wide availability (both in time and medium; forum-type tools for async plus many hours scattered through the week where someone was on Teams or Zoom for video) to seek help, at least a week of lead time on all assignments, and wide submission windows for the few assignments that we did need to put time limits on to be fair assessments eg. our final was 90m to do a dozen questions, each automatically randomized from a bank of similar questions, starting when you open it, any time between 2:00-10:30p the day of the exam. I was actually impressed with how little obvious cheating, bullshit, and advantage-taking there was.
And yet, when talking to students in help times, piles of stories about other instructors being unreasonable. Attendance-required synchronous lectures, narrow deadlines, motherfuckers trying to call roll aloud in a Zoom room, and other bullshit.
Right now, the one and only grading criteria standing is "can you certify that they've learned enough to continue in their program of study without being a menace to themselves or others?" - Yes? Done. Pass.

i think the worst moment of teaching while under quarantine was when one of my students apologized to me for submitting his weekly essays late and then went on to explain how he and his younger siblings share a single laptop and he only uses it after they've fallen asleep https://twitter.com/k8bushofficial/status/1257724084487479296 …